Another Tuesday, another round of Republican primaries pitting self-proclaimed Tea Party candidates against their (sometimes slightly, sometimes considerably) more moderate opponents….

The “weak tea” trend continued Tuesday in a series of marquee primary battles stretching from the upper to lower Midwest.

Really? I watched the election results, too, and that thought didn’t cross my mind. But here’s their argument, for what it’s worth:

1) Roy Blunt (American Conservative Union Lifetime Rating: 93) won his Senate primary over a state senator who had no money and whom practically no one in Missouri had ever heard of.

2) Rep. Jerry Moran, R, beat Todd Tiahrt, R, for the Senate nomination in Kansas. Both are establishment Republican conservatives and they share almost identical voting records in Congress.

3) Rick Snyder won a four-way GOP primary for governor in Michigan. This is the closest thing to real evidence in the piece: Snyder is slightly more moderate. But Snyder, a businessman, was the only “outsider” in the race — he was facing a congressman, the state’s attorney general, and a county sheriff who has run statewide before. None of the other candidates successfully claimed the “tea party” mantle, either.

4) Kevin Yoder, always considered the prohibitive favorite for the GOP nod in Kansas’s open third district, won a nine-way race by just 7 points after outspending his main conservative opponent five-to-one.

That’s evidence? Talk about “weak tea.”

Meanwhile:

1-3) All three of the Club for Growth-backed House candidates won their Republican primaries. That includes Justin Amash, described to me as “the first politician in Michigan to go to the Tea Party.” He is now favored to replace moderate Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Mich.

4) The “Tea Party” guy running for the GOP nod in Bart Stupak’s district — an outsider, but not necessarily any more conservative than the more “establishment” state Senator he ran against — currently leads by just one vote, pending a recount.

5) Billy Long won the GOP nomination to replace Blunt in his southwest Missouri district. Long ran as a conservative and as a political outsider — he is an auctioneer. He defeated two sitting state senators after getting the endorsement of conservative former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, R, and Missouri Right to Life.

Now, mind you, I wouldn’t contend that last night was a dazzling one for Tea Partiers, but it definitely wasn’t a crushing defeat, either. At worst, it was mixed, probably mostly positive. The Newsweek premise is just absurd.

About The Author

Bio:David Freddoso came to the Washington Examiner in June 2009, after serving for nearly two years as a Capitol Hill-based staff reporter for National Review Online.
Before writing his New York Times bestselling book, The Case Against Barack Obama, he spent three years assisting Robert Novak, the legendary Washington...

David Freddoso came to the Washington Examiner in June 2009, after serving for nearly two years as a Capitol Hill-based staff reporter for National Review Online.

Before writing his New York Times bestselling book, The Case Against Barack Obama, he spent three years assisting Robert Novak, the legendary Washington columnist. Freddoso arrived in Washington in late 2001 and began covering Capitol Hill for the conservative weekly newspaper Human Events.